1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to communications in a printing system, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for implementing one click printing in a web browser.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet is a fusion of many different networks, public and private, big and small, that have agreed to connect to one another. An intranet is a network which is restricted and while it may follow the Internet protocol, none or only part of the network available from outside a “firewall” surrounding the intranet is part of the agreed connection to the Internet. The composite network represented by these networks relies on no single transmission medium. Rather, bi-directional communication can occur via satellite links, fiber-optic trunk lines, phone lines, cable TV wires and local radio links. When a client computer logs onto the Internet at a university, a corporate office or from home, everything looks local, but the access to the network does cost time and line charges.
A particularly important part of the Internet is the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is comprised of a number of computers scattered throughout the Internet that provide information in the form of graphical documents called Web pages. The growth of the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web, have accelerated the development of new standards and programming languages for creating content for the World Wide Web such as the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), the Java™” programming language, and scripting languages developed for use in HTML documents.
From a user's point of view, access to the Internet and its services typically are accomplished by invoking a network application program such as a network browser. The network application program acts as an interface between the user and the Internet. Network application programs are typically “client” applications that accept commands from the user and obtain Internet data and services by sending requests to “server” applications on other computers at other locations on the Internet.
While there are a number of different types of network application programs, perhaps the most important application for retrieving and viewing information from the Internet is the network browser. The network browser is commonly referred to today as a web browser because of its ability to retrieve and display Web pages from the World Wide Web. Some examples of commercially available browsers include the Internet Netscape® Navigator by Netscape Communications of Mountain View, Calif., and Mosaic developed at NCSA, University of Illinois.
To retrieve information from computers on the Internet, web browsers send network requests via the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Gopher document protocol and others. A web browser and server applications use these network requests to exchange data across the Internet, or some other computer network. HTTP is a protocol used to access data on the World Wide Web. In particular, web browsers use HTTP to retrieve documents created in the HTML from Web servers on the Internet, in intranets, or from the user's own local file system on the hard drive. The location of resource such as an HTML document is defined by an address called a URL (“Uniform Resource Locater”). Web browsers use the URL to find and fetch resources from the Internet and the World Wide Web.
For example, if one is currently at a Web-site (i.e., in a particular Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document), at which there is a highlighted or embedded “hypertext link” specifying the Internet address of another Web-site (i.e., another HTML document), then the user can access (i.e., “surf to”) this other Web-site by simply “clicking on” or selecting the highlighted URL with his or her pointing device (e.g., “mouse”) in a conventional manner. The ability to connect to other Web-sites by simply pointing and clicking on highlighted URLs embedded in an HTML document has contributed enormously to the growth and popularity of the Internet in the last few years.
If the user desires to connect to a Web-site that is not referenced in a HTML document viewed through a browser program, then the user oftentimes finds it necessary to manually enter the URL of the Web-site (e.g., “http://www.metrologic.com”) into the browser program. This requires manually pressing a sequence of keys on a keyboard or remote control device, corresponding to the characters of the URL being selected. In addition to being time consuming, this Web-site surfing technique is prone to errors, causing the browser program to connect to the wrong Web-site or return an error message. From a practical point of view, this is quite frustrating to the Internet user.
A hypertext link may also be associated with portions of images or control features such as buttons, menus, and the like. Hypertext links allow a user to navigate from the source document to the target document by activation of the link and thereby retrieve the target document in this fashion. For example, web browser users sometimes encounter links to pre-formatted documents they wish to print (such as PDF, PostScript, and PCL files). The conventional way to print them is either to:                A) download and send them to a printer (postscript and PCL files)        B) download them, open them in a viewer, and select “print”, which formats the document through a print driver(PDF files)        C) copy the URL, use the browser to go to a printer web page which provides an interface to “pull” printing, and enter the URL, telling the printer to access the document directly from the server and print it        
However, each of the above printing methods have disadvantages. For example, the first two method require the user to download the document thereby preventing the user from continuing to surf the web. This ties up the user's system while the document is being downloaded. The third method is rather new and requires the printer to have a built-in web server, and many web pages. One of those pages is for requesting “pull” printing. The user fills in a box with the URL of a file and clicks “submit.” Then the printer fetches the document from the server and prints it. An advantage to this third method is that the document does not pass through the user's system during the process. Nevertheless, an easier method of printing documents that exploits the modern “pull print” method without requiring copying of the URL is not provided.
It can be seen that there is a need for a method and apparatus for implementing one click printing in a web browser.